Passengers stuck for hours inside Eurotunnel

Eurotunnel passengers were left stranded for hours inside the Channel Tunnel after a train broke down.

Footage from the Eurotunnel Le Shuttle showed holidaymakers being evacuated through an emergency service tunnel alongside the 31-mile rail route between Britain and France, after abandoning their vehicles.

Describing the experience as being “like a disaster movie”, travellers were transferred to a cargo train after being stuck in the under-sea tunnel for nearly five hours, and then taken to the Folkestone terminal in Kent.

The initial breakdown late on Tuesday affected the 3.50pm Eurotunnel Le Shuttle service from Calais to Folkestone and led to hundreds of passengers being ushered into a service tunnel.

“The service tunnel was terrifying,” Sarah Fellows, 37, from Birmingham told the PA news agency after the incident on Tuesday evening.

It took her 18 hours to return home from a family holiday in France after the “utter carnage” of the evacuation.

“It was like a disaster movie. You were just walking into the abyss not knowing what was happening. We all had to stay under the sea in this big queue,” she added.

“There was a woman crying in the tunnel, another woman having a panic attack who was travelling alone.”

Another passenger who was evacuated, but did not want to be named, told PA that “several people were freaking out about being down in the service tunnel, it’s a bit of a weird place”.

He added: “We were stuck down there for at least five hours. If I’ve got a gripe it’s that they knew several hundred people were arriving at Folkestone who hadn’t eaten for five, six or more hours and there was absolutely nothing for us here. Just huge queues for Burger King.”

Le Shuttle initially tweeted that a train had broken down, but later told the BBC that this was incorrect; alarms had gone off and this needed to be investigated.

Travellers in Calais were told not to travel to the terminal on Tuesday night and to arrive after 6am on Wednesday.

A spokesman for Eurotunnel Le Shuttle said: “A train has broken down in the tunnel and we are in the process of transferring customers to a separate passenger shuttle via the service tunnel, to return to our Folkestone terminal. We apologise sincerely for this inconvenience.”

The Eurotunnel is the third longest railway tunnel in the world at 37.9km (23.5 miles), and it has the longest underwater section of any tunnel in the world.